Alexandra Aldrich will be talking about her memoir "The Astor Orphan" at the Barrett Bookstore in Darien on May 1 and the Wilton Library on May 9.

Alexandra Aldrich will be talking about her memoir "The Astor Orphan" at the Barrett Bookstore in Darien on May 1 and the Wilton Library on May 9.

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Alexandra Aldrich's "The Astor Orphan" is about a cash poor branch of the famously rich American family.

Alexandra Aldrich's "The Astor Orphan" is about a cash poor branch of the famously rich American family.

Photo: Contributed Photo

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Memoir charts growing up in cash-strapped Astor mansion

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Alexandra Aldrich is a descendant of the hugely wealthy Astor clan, but she grew up in a branch of the family that had a Hudson Valley mansion with extensive grounds but very little money.

Alexandra grew up in a 43-room historic house -- Rokeby -- but her father often had to borrow grocery money from the man who ran a nearby gas station.

This property-rich, cash-poor existence is the subject of Aldrich's new memoir, "The Astor Orphan" (Ecco, $24.99), which has just been published to strong advance reviews. Publisher's Weekly called it "a sparklingly mischievous debut."

The author will be talking about the book at the Barrett Bookstore in Darien on Wednesday, May 1, and the Wilton Library on Thursday, May 9.

In an interview last week, Aldrich said she was inspired by such popular memorists as Augusten Burroughs and Jeannette Walls when she sat down to write about her childhood at Rokeby.

"It wouldn't be as interesting as fiction," the writer said when asked if she ever thought of turning the material into a novel. "Fact really is stranger than fiction."

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Aldrich makes it clear that the book is a remembrance of her childhood and not a work of journalism or history.

"There has been a lot of discussion of memoir," the writer said of controversies that have flared up over the factual content of some of the most popular examples of the genre. "It's so subjective ... and things may not be exactly as you remember them."

Aldrich did have both of her parents read the book and sign off on it.

She said that without having a father who is such a great storyteller, recalling the past would have been a lot harder.

The author's father acted as the defacto caretaker of the property and all-around handyman, but the size of Rokeby and the expense of keeping it shipshape led to a sort of bohemian squalor.

"The Astor Orphan" charts the tug of war between the author's dad and Grandma Claire over the style and standards that ruled during Alexandra's childhood. The notion of decendants of a fabled, wealthy family living in squalor led to some pre-publication comparisons between the book and the documentary "Grey Gardens," about the notoriously rundown Bouvier house in the Hamptons.

Aldrich said it wasn't until she got divorced in 2005 that she really went to work on the book.

"I had been thinking about doing it (but after the) divorce I became possessed by the past. For many years, I had been blocked because I thought it was too complicated. The thing I had always felt was that the family history stopped in 1963," she said of her attempt to chart the changes at Rokeby over the past 50 years.

Part of the family's problem, she said, was that everyone was obsessed by keeping Rokeby going "but they didn't know how to handle joint ownership." Various factions of the family would live in rooms scattered throughout the mansion, but didn't formulate a real management game plan until after the author's childhood years covered in the book.

Aldrich said there has been a therapeutic aspect of writing about some of the confusion and distress of her childhood years.

"I had a lot of rage I carried into adulthood, but I needed to move on emotionally. The 1970s and '80s were the lowest point (of the family) and unfortunately that's the story I had to tell," she said.

Aldrich will be at the Barrett Bookstore, 314 Heights Road, Darien at 7 p.m. on May 1 and at the Wilton Library, 137 Old Ridgefield Road, Wilton on May 9 at 7 p.m.

Shelton Sci-Fi

Celine Rose Mariotti of Shelton is the author of a new young-adult book, "I Have a Friend on Jupiter!," about a pen-pal relationship that extends to outer space.

"I love the space program and have followed it since I was a kid. I was 9 years old when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon," Mariotti wrote in an email about the book. "I always liked watching the old TV show, `Lost in Space' where they encountered all kinds of alien creatures on the planets they landed on ... And I got the idea for two kids who are into the space program and who find a website where they can write to people in outer space. I also always liked pen-paling so I guess I connected the two."